“Everybody’s a suspect!”: Scream’s Ghostface Duo as the antithesis of Team Serial Killers

• In Event: You Haven’t Seen What? Podcast Discusses Scream (1996)

Abstract

Scream (1996) set the horror genre stage for an amalgamation of movies relevant to serial murder, team serial killers, and copycat killers (e.g., Cult Killer, Identity, Kiss the Girls, Murder by Numbers, Zodiac, etc.). However, the horror genre of Scream (1996) intrinsically defies the realities of serial murder, especially regarding Team Serial Killers. The “Rules of Horror Movies,” as the character Randy Meeks recounts in Scream (1996), accurately depicts the typical horror movie or slasher film. However, attempting to paint the Scream franchise as anything other than a series of slasher films – devoid of the facts regarding real-life serial murder – is not only misguided but empirically inaccurate. The following presentation reviews “Randy’s Horror Movie Rules” and the inaccuracies of the Ghostface Duo from Scream (1996) through the lens of real-life team serial killers and extant research on this form of serial murder.

Author

• Caroline V. Comerford, Sacred Heart University